What’s with all the different types of salt?
AIGUES-MORTES, FRANCE >> Knee-deep in the improbably pink marsh water of the Camargue, on the southern coast of France, I shoveled fleur de sel crystals onto the shore into shimmering mounds, the same way that the sauniers, traditional salt workers, toiling around me on a hot July morning have been doing in that region since Roman times.
Eric Beaumer, a master saunier at Le Saunier de Camargue, sprinkled some of the warm, damp salt into my hand. I licked my palm, and the shards crunched, then dissolved in a saline burst. It was the same mineral rush I had experienced earlier that day when I sprinkled fleur de sel on my eggs, and the one I would have again two hours later with a tomato salad. The brittle crystals made the eggs seem more custardy, the tomatoes more ripely sweet. That’s the magic of flaky sea salt: It makes food taste more deeply of itself.
Legions of chefs and home cooks have fallen hard for fancy, flaky salt — even though it can cost more than 10 times as much as the stuff you’d find in a shaker. But 30 years ago, here in the Camargue, only a few devoted sauniers bothered to harvest fleur de sel at all.
“We couldn’t give it away,” Beaumer said, handing me another pinch to crunch.
This is because, for most of the 20th century, salt was just salt, and largely industrial table salt — tiny white grains of near-pure sodium, the saline version of factory-sliced white bread — at that. Cheap and modern, it wore its sterile absence of color and variability as a badge of purity.
But decades before Salt Bae, and around the same time as the rise of the organic food movement, chefs started to rediscover salts with character: snowflakelike Maldon, minerally fleur de sel, Himalayan salt with its sunrise glow.
Innovators like Ferran Adrià at El Bulli, Alice Waters at Chez Panisse and Ruth Rogers of the River Café found that flaky salt made a vast difference in their cooking. Just a few grains sprinkled on at the end could transform anything — pastas, roasted meats, soups, chocolate desserts — in a way that granular salt simply couldn’t.
Cookbook and recipe writers began calling for different varieties — sometimes, maddeningly, in the same recipe. A growing subset of hard-core salt-tooths carry rarefied crystals in tins the size of a thumb, at the ready in a pocket or purse to calibrate any restaurant dish to their own personal ideal of salinity.
Today, these select salts are easier to find than ever before, both in supermarkets and online. But being this spoiled by choice can be confusing. Are fine sea salt and table salt interchangeable? Can you finish a dish that calls for flaky Maldon with coarse sea salt from a grinder instead? And why do various brands of kosher salt — Morton’s and Diamond Crystal, for example — have such different levels of salinity?
To help break it all down, here’s a salt primer. with the rise of agriculture and animal husbandry in the Neolithic period. As humans increased their dependence on vegetables and grains, they had to start salting their food.
And as early civilizations developed, salt became one of their primary economic drivers, said Mark Kurlansky, author of “Salt: A World History.” “Before the Industrial Revolution, most international trade was of food,” he said, “and you couldn’t trade food without preserving it in salt first.” Fish, meat, vegetables and cheeses were all heavily salted (and sometimes fermented) before being shipped around the globe. And in ancient Egypt, Kurlansky said, people weren’t just using salt to preserve their food; they used it to preserve their dead.
“A mummy is a salted product, just like a codfish,” he said.
Until its mass production in the early 20th century, salt was necessarily expressive of the geography and climate where it was produced. The mineral content of the salt, evaporation or mining techniques used to harvest it, and local traditions produced wildly different results, from bloodred Haleakala crystals from Hawaii to nubby gray pebbles from Brittany and glassy white Hana flakes from Japan — all of which are still produced, at least in small quantities.
Mark Bitterman, the author of four books about salt and an owner of the Meadow, a small chain of specialty salt shops, calls preindustrial salt the first local food, a totem of place and time.
“Most salt has no place. It’s an industrialized product and can come from anywhere,” he said of modern varieties. But a traditionally made salt connects us to its origin in a vital, immutable way. “You can grow a San Marzano tomato in California, but you can’t make fleur de sel de Guérande in San Francisco Bay.”
Location isn’t the only factor; technique is also pivotal.
Ben Jacobsen, the owner of Jacobsen Salt Co. in Portland, Oregon, had his cometo-salt moment over an arugula-and-tuna salad, awed by the way the feathery crystals added a crunch that went beyond saltiness. “It was just arugula, canned fish and olive oil, but the salt made everything so much better,” he said. “It blew me away.”
Jacobsen’s impulse was to make his own. His first attempt was in his home